The importance of recording the past is prominent in The House of the Spirits. From the time Clara, one of the main characters, is young girl, she is “already in the habit of writing down important matters” in various notebooks, which her future granddaughter, Alba, eventually uses to “reclaim the past and overcome terrors of [her] own.” For Clara, the recording of events bears “witness to life,” even if she does enter events in her notebook and promptly forget them. The importance of writing and the past is also expressed in the travel notebooks of Clara’s Uncle Marcos, and Clara’s mother, Nívea, tells endless stories of past generations, a tradition that Clara continues with her own daughter, Blanca, and her granddaughter Alba. The House of the Spirits is told through the lives of Clara's future husband, Esteban, and Alba, who both connect with the past through Clara’s notebooks. Through their shared account, Allende argues for the value of recording the past, which is otherwise lost to time and poor memory.
In addition to Clara’s notebooks, writing is significant in other ways throughout the novel as well. When Blanca lives away from her family, during her short marriage to Count Jean de Satigny, Blanca and Clara write each other every day. Blanca and Clara’s “abundant correspondence” bears “witness to life,” and they take the place of Clara’s notebooks during this difficult time. Nicolás’s girlfriend, Amanda, is initially fascinated with Clara’s spiritualist lifestyle, but Amanda soon grows tired of summoning spirits and instead takes a job as a newspaper reporter. Like Clara’s notebooks, Amanda’s choice reflects the importance of writing and recording history; in a way, it’s a concrete, mundane version of summoning the spirits of the past. Clara’s social circle is isn’t complete without “the Poet,” a man whose love sonnets sweep the nation, along with his poems about revolution and social justice. Like Amanda’s job as a newspaper reporter, the Poet is dedicated to recording history, albeit in a different and more lyrical way.
For Allende’s characters, writing is also a means of coping and healing after tragic events. When Clara and Blanca stop talking to Esteban because of his violent and abusive ways, Esteban uses their letters and writing to “salvage events from the mists of improbable facts.” Without this recording of history, Esteban would have zero insight into the lives of his wife and daughter. After Clara’s death, when Esteban is heartbroken and further distanced from his family by his anger and violence, he uses writing to heal. “I can’t talk about it,” Esteban says of his pain. “But I’ll try to write it.” While nothing can completely relieve Esteban’s suffering, writing does enable him to better able to cope with his grief. When Alba is arrested by the police during the military coup, she invokes the spirit of her dead grandmother for strength. Clara’s ghost advises Alba to “write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret” Alba is living, so the world will know “this horror that is taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who do not want to know.” For Clara and Alba, the recording of events is evidence of the past, which otherwise is at risk of being ignored or forgotten.
According to Alba, “memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events.” This, Alba claims, is why Grandmother Clara writes in her notebooks, “in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.” The past is at risk of being lost in The House of the Spirits, but over and over again, it is successfully reclaimed through writing.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Writing and the Past ThemeTracker
Writing and the Past Quotes in The House of the Spirits
Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.
Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pencil, to keep her thoughts occupied and to escape from the doghouse and live. She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side. “You have a lot to do, so stop feeling sorry for yourself, drink some water, and start writing,” Clara told her granddaughter before disappearing the same way she had come.
“If you want, I’ll tell you my story so you can write it down,” one said. Then they laughed and made jokes, arguing that everybody’s story was the same and that it would be better to write love stories because everyone likes them. They also forced me to eat. They divided up the servings with the strictest sense of justice, each according to her need; they gave me a little more because they said I was just skin and bones and not even the most desperate man would ever look at me. I shuddered, but Ana Diaz reminded me that I was not the only woman who had been raped, and that, along with many other things, it was something I had to forget. The women spent the whole day singing at the top of their lungs. The guards would pound on the wall.
“Shut up, whores!”
“Make us if you can, bastards! Let’s see if you dare!” And they sang even stronger but the guards did not come in, for they had learned that there is no way to avoid the unavoidable.
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously—as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of ail eras mingled in space. That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
